


taking time, taking care

by readythefanons



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Caretaking, F/M, Fluff, Hand Feeding, Post-War, Pre-Relationship, Rated T for swears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28572453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readythefanons/pseuds/readythefanons
Summary: Things in Almyra are going fine for Claude, right up until they go sideways in a big way. So he has to get out of the city in a hurry, which sucks, and he has to leave his wyvern behind which sucks more—such a lot more, leaving her behind hurts, but he’ll be back—and then he’s fleeing through the countryside and it just isn’t his day, week, month, whatever.Claude is not a country boy. Claude is a creature of cities, of civilization, he’s not made for fleeing on foot over broken terrain, for hiding out in gross little ditches, for all this.When things are at their worst, a friend appears.
Relationships: Leonie Pinelli/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16
Collections: FE3H Kink Meme





	taking time, taking care

**Author's Note:**

> another [kinkmeme fill](https://3houseskinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/2082.html?thread=3656226#cmt3656226) where the poster requested dear, independent claude having a bad day and unexpectedly getting help from his crush. 
> 
> With thanks to OP (and apologies it's not shippier!) and the folks on discord

Things in Almyra are going fine for Claude, right up until they go sideways in a big way. So he has to get out of the city in a hurry, which sucks, and he has to leave his wyvern behind which sucks more—such a lot more, leaving her behind hurts, but he’ll be back—and then he’s fleeing through the countryside and it just isn’t his day, week, month, whatever.

Claude is not a country boy. Claude is a creature of cities, of civilization. He’s not made for fleeing on foot over broken terrain, for hiding out in gross little ditches, for all this shit. For all his knowledge of poisons, Claude doesn’t know much about regular foraging for actually edible food either. So his day (week, whatever) gets worse and worse. And then—well, it’s the rainy season. It rains, and rains, and rains, and Claude is soaked to the bone. If he were up the mountains he’d probably be dead by now, and as it is he’s chilled. The weather isn’t cold this time of year, but Claude can’t remember the last time he was dry, and he is cold. And he’s tired, and hungry, and at least he’s not thirsty, haha, and he might have been lightly stabbed on his way out of the city.

He curls (pathetically, but who cares) against the base of a tree in the hopes that it will keep the rain off, but all the leaves seem to be doing is concentrating the rain so he gets hit less frequently with much bigger raindrops. He’d find somewhere else to sit but he’s exhausted, and there’s really no other place to sit that’s going to be better.

He closes his eyes for just a minute—just to catch his breath, just to rest his eyes so the world stops jittering so much—only to have them shoot open again because—because he hears someone moving through the forest. They’re moving quietly, they know what they’re doing, they’ve found Claude and he is too tired to even get to his feet, barely has the energy to hold onto the knife he’s been gripping since he hauled ass out of the city. Fuck, he’s going to die here, in this anonymous forest, without ever breaking the barriers between Fodlan and Almyra, without doing _anything_ , and he—

“What the—Claude?” says an impossibly familiar voice. Claude squints through the rain, and— “Holy _shit,_ is it really you?” Somehow, impossibly, it’s Leonie. She’s wearing an Almyran-styled rain cloak and has some kind of machete in one hand. The blade she quickly puts away in favor of hurrying closer. “It is you, finally, what the shit,” she says, neatly summing up Claude’s current feelings on the matter. “What the, wow, okay, you’re soaked.” 

“Am I—hallucinating?” Claude asks because that’s the only thing that makes sense.

“Nope, just—you know what, just come with me, okay? No arguing,” Leonie says, and she practically lifts him bodily to his feet and half-carries him through the forest to—oh, wow Claude must’ve made it closer to the mountains than he thought. There’s a cave up ahead. Big one, too. There’s a surly pony just inside and a campfire circle deeper in. Leonie helps him in and sits him on the ground, then starts making a fire. “Can’t believe I finally ran into you,” she says. 

“Same,” Claude says, meaning it, and Leonie laughs. The fire catches and she turns around to face him. 

“Damn, you’re soaked,” she says. 

“And you’re in Almyra,” is what Claude comes up with. Sue him, he’s tired. Leonie only smiles, and the firelight dances in her eyes and Claude is just utterly—confused, and tired, and it’s entirely impossible that any of this is happening but at least he’s having a nice hallucination before he goes. She grabs a pot and fills it with water by dint of holding it outside the mouth of the cave under the rain, then sets it to heat. Then she comes closer, kneeling next to him. 

“You’re soaked to the bone,” she observes. She waves at Claude’s general person and says, predictably, “Take all that off, let’s warm you up.” It’s a testament to how tired Claude is that instead of doing exactly that—or arguing—he just closes his eyes. He knows he’ll feel better when he’s not soaking, but he’s wearing so many clothes and doesn’t know where to start and—“Good grief, someone really did a number on you,” Leonie says without censure, and she unlaces his shirt and helps peel it off of him. Claude shivers as his wet skin is exposed to the air of the falling evening, but he already feels better without the weight of the sopping fabric. She hisses as his shirt comes off, though, and—“Dude, you got stabbed, but I guess you already knew that.” Oh, right.

“Just a graze,” he mumbles, which is factually incorrect, but his Crest kept him alive long enough to make it this far and that had to be good enough. It still hurt, though, and his attempts at field medicine had been less than impressive.

“Pegasus blessings,” Leonie sighs. To Claude’s confusion, she pats his shoulder. Her hands are very warm. “If you can wait, we’ll get you patched up in a bit, okay?” Claude nods uncertainly. Then she sits by his feet and unlaces his boots, which she eases off his feet. She doesn’t hesitate to peel his soaking wet socks off either. 

When she reaches for his waistband, Claude manages to come alive enough to wave her away, laboriously starts to struggle out of his pants. She shrugs and turns her back—oh, she’s getting something out of her packs. It’s a blanket. The next thing Claude knows, warmth is settling over him. Oh, wow, Leonie’s blanket is a little scratchy but the dry fabric feels so good against his skin. Claude clutches at it with clumsy fingers, tries to draw it around himself. Leonie grabs it where it’s slipping, wraps it more firmly around his shoulders. “Those too, off with them,” she says of Claude’s underthings. Claude has been awake so long his brain is swimming in its own poisons, but he manages to move sluggishly. While he does, she turns back to the fire. 

By the time Claude is entirely nude, save for the blanket, Leonie has returned. She presses a cup of tea into Claude’s hands. The smell of it takes him right back to their Academy days, and he inhales the steam before sipping carefully. Between the warmth of the blanket and the heat of the tea, Claude might melt, or at least fall asleep without meaning to. Leonie leaves his side again, brings him some cheese and nuts.

“I’ll make real food, but start with this,” she instructs. Claude blinks at the food like he’s never seen it before, then tries to figure out how to hold his teacup and take the food from her at the same time. She settles him with a hand to his shoulder and just breaks off a piece of the cheese. She holds it up for him, pops it in his mouth. She feeds him the whole handful with matter-of-fact, unflusterable kindness, then pats his shoulder and goes back to—to making food, for him, for them. Claude—Claude is exhausted. He can barely finish his tea. 

She rouses him when the food is ready—fire roasted fish—and sits at his side and even helps him eat it. Claude could, probably, eat his own fish, but Leonie seems content to break off bite-sized pieces for him. Skies above, she’s feeding him like he’s a _child_ , even making sure none of the morsels she gives him have any bones to deal with. Claude should probably put a stop to this, assert his independence or something. 

“You should eat too,” is what he manages. Leonie—again, predictably, if Claude were in any state to predict things—shrugs and puts the next bite in her own mouth. Then she holds out another one for Claude.

“C’mon, this fish isn’t going to eat itself,” she says, and Claude just—lets her. He tells himself he’s just curious about where this is all going. It has nothing to do with how he can’t even remember the last time someone just—did things for him, for no apparent reason. Leonie isn’t being paid to do things for him, and she doesn’t have that calculating edge people have when they’re trying to curry favor, so he indulges in the notion that maybe she’s just doing this because she wants to. Just for a second. 

When the fish is gone, Leonie puts her hand on the top of Claude’s head. She makes a face.

“This has to be bothering you. Let’s dry you off some more,” and before Claude can object that he’s fine, actually—better than fine, he’s warm and dry and his belly is full—she’s up and moving again. She brings some fabric—it’s an old tunic—and kneels next to Claude. Then she drops it over his head and starts briskly rubbing his hair dry. “Wet hair drives me crazy,” she says as if that’s enough reason to sacrifice her own clothes for Claude’s comfort. “Worst part of having long hair.”

“Works on you,” Claude says. He’s too busy trying to stay awake to see how that brings a flush to her cheeks.

“Oh. Thanks,” she says, and attacks his head more energetically. Claude once again lets her, for reasons that don’t bear examining. She doesn’t move off when she’s finished, staying close. Claude’s whole body is heavy with exhaustion. 

“I’m going to look at your wound now,” she says apologetically. Claude makes a face. He doesn’t want Leonie to look at his wound, he wants her to stay where she is and maybe let him lean against her for a while. Her arm snakes around his shoulders, and she tugs him into a light hug. Now he really wants her to stay where she is. “It’ll suck, but I have to take a look, okay? Then you can sleep.” Speaking is too much work, so Claude manages a shrug. Leonie eases him up, kneels in front of him, and pushes the blanket to the side. Claude’s brain turns on just enough to try to tug the other corner of the blanket over his groin, and she absent-mindedly reaches out and helps him cover himself. Then she pats his hand. Claude stares muzzily at her hand, small and scarred, where it rests over his own.

She hisses through her teeth as she inspects his wound. “Goddess, Claude, this looks—how long ago did this happen?” she asks, and it’s the first time since she showed up that there’s actual tension in her voice. Claude tries to think. 

“Few days?” he manages eventually. The hand covering his tightens briefly, and then it disappears. She puts both hands on his torso, achingly gentle, and probes gently around the wound.

“It looks better than I’d expect then,” she says, “Looks older. It is healing, at least, which is a relief.” Explaining how the Crest of Riegan works is really too much work, so Claude just shrugs. “Well. I’m going to clean it up and put an actual dressing on it. Then you’re going to sleep. Sounds good?” Except for the messing with his wound, it sounds amazing. Claude nods. 

Leonie is gentle as she can be as she uses a wet cloth to clean the area around his wound. Still hurts like the blazes, though. Claude grits his teeth and bears with it because what else is he going to to. “That’s it, you’re doing great,” she murmurs, and then she smooths some kind of herbal balm over the wound. Once he’s been bandaged to her satisfaction, she retucks the blanket around his shoulders. “There you go, that’s better, right?” she asks. Claude nods mutely. “Yeah,” she murmurs, and she reaches up and tucks a stray bit of hair behind his ear. Claude is aware that, if he were more awake, the hair touching would be something worth investigating. But he’s so tired, and it feels nice, so he just blinks at her. She smiles crookedly. “You’re falling asleep right here, aren’t you? No response necessary.” And then—Claude is starting to lose little bits of time, which ordinarily would be terrifying, but she gets him lying down with something soft under his head. He’s out before she even finishes tucking the blanket around him.

He wakes feeling tired. It’s almost like, having been awake for who-knows-how-long with no food and a stab wound, a single snooze isn’t enough to completely restore him. Blargh. He looks around enough to spot Leonie sleeping nearby, wrapped up in what appears to be a horse blanket. He pushes himself so he’s sitting upright, feels faint, but ignores it. His clothes have been spread out by the fire to dry. Seeing them there makes him feel—he doesn’t want to admit it. He liked Leonie in school, as a friend and a classmate. And then, well. Claude was used to being an outsider. Leonie’s birth made her an outsider too, at least at the Academy. True, there were other commoners in the Golden Deer House, but Raphael and Ignatz were used to a level of comfort, of prosperity, that Leonie wasn’t. It showed in the way she was always scrounging, and the way she cared so meticulously for her gear, and the way got tense even watching other people spend money. Claude and Leonie weren’t the same by any means, but there was a kind of camaraderie shared by people who knew they would never totally fit in. He sits, in this cave in Almyra, where Leonie has no reason to be, and stares at her sleeping form.

He’s getting sleepy again when she wakes up. It’s a little funny to watch, she goes from asleep to awake in almost no time flat. Her eyes find Claude’s immediately. She smiles. Claude’s heart races. Uh oh.

“How you feeling?” she asks. Funny she should ask.

“Better,” Claude answers, and lets any other observations about his feelings remain unsaid. “What are you doing in Almyra?” She shrugs, rolls to her feet to poke at the remains of the fire.

“You said, after the war, you’d have something to show me. Then you disappeared to Almyra,” she says. Claude stares at her profile.

“You… were looking for me?” he asks. His heart has not slowed down, quite the opposite. She shrugs but smiles crookedly.

“I know, it’s crazy, looking for one person in a whole other country. But we’ve lived through so much impossible shit, I thought, ‘why not?’ And here I am.” She stops what she’s doing to look at Claude and smile, a bright and impossible thing, “And here _you_ are, so who’s crazy now?”

“Maybe both of us?” Claude manages weakly. This still doesn’t feel real. She laughs and doesn’t disagree. He watches as she gets the fire going and puts water on for tea again. She pokes his clothes on the ground as the water heats. 

“Still wet,” she sighs, “Which is what happens when you wear quilted clothes. Even your pants, Claude?”

“It gets cold on a wyvern,” Claude says, and she shrugs and nods like she hadn’t thought of that. 

“Never been on one,” she says, “Maybe someday.” Maybe someday. Maybe when Claude has his wyvern back, he’ll take Leonie up in the air, catch a glimpse of her smile as they leave the ground behind them, just for a little while, and see her expression as the world unrolls beneath them. Maybe if Leonie got to see the length and breadth of the world like that, she’d—they’d—

“Where are you going, after this?” Claude asks, forcibly pulling himself out of unrealistic daydreams. “You on a job?”

“Claude,” Leonie says, and she looks surprised, and—just for a second—hurt. “I came to Almyra looking for you. I think that’s _my_ question.”

“What is?” 

“Where are we going after this?” she asks, like it’s—if not easy—straightforward. 

Claude is sitting, still naked, on the floor of a cave wrapped only in Leonie’s blanket. It is a little rough, but very warm, and its owner is kneeling just a few feet away asking him where to go next. Asking him where _they_ would go next. Claude feels like he’s flying for the first time, that breathless rush, that _this is impossible, but somehow it’s happening_ feeling. Everything Leonie’s said about her village has given the impression that it’s tiny and isolated. When she was a girl, one visit from one mercenary company somehow gave her the notion to leave, to enroll in an academy filled with nobles. She traveled across Fodlan, fought in a war, and now she’s crossed into Almyra. _Claude_ survived way too many assassination attempts, hid his lineage, led the Alliance through a war, and then voluntarily jumped back into a succession crisis. And, once he’s come out on top—and he will—he’s going to lead not only his country but also its neighbors into a new era of understanding. And maybe that’s a tad ambitious, maybe his dreams are a little too big for one person to hold, but—maybe with two sets of hands, they might be more manageable. 

“You ever seen the Almyran capital?” he asks, pulse fluttering. Leonie smiles, and her eyes are clear and bright when they meet his.

“Not yet,” she says, “Want to show me?”

**Author's Note:**

> brain tired but have fic... outside my usual wheelhouse, I know, but :D Claude and Leonie really do have great support conversations, and why not start the new year off with a little caretaking? :)  
> Comments are a delight!


End file.
